The entire eastern seaboard from Richmond, VA to Maine is flooding/expecting flooding. Chicago and Michigan are also expecting to have some issues with storm surge.
An extra day isn't going to change anything. I'd say push it by a week or don't bother changing the date.
Most importantly, 75 Broad just flooded; pretty soon they'll lose 55 Broad, 25 Broad, 60 Hudson, and potentially 111 8th. The problem is the generators are not on particularly high floors, and people only keep certain amounts of fuel (<24h, often around 8h), and even with "guaranteed refueling contracts", a lot of people won't be getting diesel in time.
(EDIT: these are the main carrier hotels and colocation facilities in the Northeast, all in Manhattan.)
IRC. (with people who lived out of colos in Lower Manhattan after 9/11, since if they left the area they wouldn't have been allowed back in -- living off vending machine food for a week or two reconfiguring equipment for themselves and other networks to account for the missing part of the city)
Also, woo, no more 111 8th. Building power is down for most of the building (all of it?) (per floor), although some of the areas have their own generators (Level(3) and the old AboveNet area)
I was wondering, if you happen to know, why there are so many colos in NYC / Manhattan? In general wouldn't you locate a server farm somewhere with cheap land / electricity / cooling? What advantage do they get from being there?
They're not really server colos (except for some wall street stuff, but even that is in Northern NJ now). The Manhattan facilities are mainly carrier interconnects between carriers and for equipment to provide leased circuits to businesses, a lot of which serve customers in Manhattan or grew up around telephone infrastructure to serve offices in Manhattan.
Big scale server colos are usually in WA/OR (cheap power), SFBA (fiber, tech companies), TX (cheap land, sort of cheap power, or at least available power), or DC metro (sort of cheap power, cheap land in some areas, lots of government users).
you're historically right about this, but wrong on a bunch of other levels. there is a few million square feet of real server colo in 111 8th ave, and at least an order of magnitude more than that combined across the other spaces mentioned.
The reason they locate there (as with in London) if to reduce the latency for financial trading programs. It may not sound like a lot, but when you have an automatic trading application processing billions of trades a year it can make a huge difference to receive the information a little earlier, and place your orders that little bit quicker.
As a side note, Internap's LGA11 datecentre facility on 75 Broad Street is currently being evacuated, and most of the fuel reserves are submerged below water...
The report I heard (at about 11PM EDT) was that the basement was flooded and the building was being evacuated, but servers would keep running for 5-7 hours until the back-up generators ran out of fuel.
... and note that making the deadline while being hit by a massive hurricane is a powerful litmus test. Of course, the question is: A litmus test for what?
Most of Manhattan is without power. While some people may think it's badass to hack through the storm oblivious, the situation out here is pretty intense. I would encourage some leniency with the deadline, especially since as far as I know for NYC, things won't be back to normal for quite a few days.
Not to make light of the situation at hand, but that would be a pretty epic story; I'd definitely read the post on "How I hacked my way into YC by stealing a jetski to get away from the floods, then hitchhiked across the US to hand delivery my application to PG's door within 15 minutes of the deadline"
False, just lower manahattan near the financial district.
(unless i'm just a lucky manhattanite who's not read the right news sites and has lovely power)
that said, subways being closed is going to be a huge hassle for the next few days.
ConEd shut of power to the Financial District at approximately 7PM, but there were a number of explosions at substations including the one at 14th Street. There are over 1 million New Yorkers without power; ConEd reports most places below Midtown are dark.
They evacuated NYU Langone Hospital when its backup generator failed, so yes, consider yourself very lucky.
Trains in NYC are expected to be down through the end of the week, Connecticut has closed highways to non-emergency traffic, chunks of Manhattan have no power and patients at one NYC hospital are being evacuated due to generator failure. Homes in NY and CT are being flooded, some banks are being closed indefinitely.
I imagine that a lot of YC folks may be scrambling to check on homes and loved ones and trying to keep generators working, etc.
I think a deadline extension would be appropriate. I know there's an argument to be made that folks should be prepared, but this (like many of the weather events I got to experience in Western Mass last year) really is unprecedented.
(I have no stake in this, I just think extending the deadline is the right thing to do).
My relatives are in NJ and from what I hear, they lost power all around them. Given last year's snow storm, it will take a week to get electricity/internet back to normal. At this point, a day won't make a difference.
Yes. In my experience with events, at least, most of the proposals come in on the last couple of days of the CFP. In an ideal world, I'd say.. that shows how unprepared they are!.. but I'm pretty much the same and it's just how people work ;-)
A lot of people actively work on their application until the submission deadline. If your product is moving fast, along with adoption, it would be handicapping yourself to submit weeks early, I think.
Re: rdl's comment, I'm not sure. I'm not experienced with YCombinator process or startups, but can't the founders explain their application was sent as of the submission date (weeks or days before), and then explain during the interview about the important changes? I mean, Parkinson's Law is in play with entrepreneurship big time.
A lot of people didn't know about this until recently though, like me. I'm not in any danger from Sandy right now, though and still want them to be able to submit. Obviously a deadline extension would be positive for me, but I was prepared to submit tomorrow regardless of seeing this post.
Edit: Maybe you filter by location? But why make it complex?
Some people (like me) might be working on demos to go with the application. I also dwell on details like appearance and usability, and am hesitant to submit something I am not really happy with. I am going to submit right at the end.
For those who really want to apply you can do it(I live in the Greater NY area). The "Last minute-rs" will get it done tonight if they are sure tonight it the deadline
But then a YES in case there is a dropbox or Airbnb waiting out there
The water level in Battery Park was 13 feet at its highest and broke previous record 11 feet at 1821. Manhattan south of 39th street lost power since 9:00pm.
This is probably the first time in last 100 years for dwellers living in Manhattan downtown see flood in their homes. Especially for people who lives in ground floor or basements.
pg - its better to be compassionate than not be. if moving the date isn't that difficult for you and doesn't adversely affect the operation of YC - it only goes to strength the resolve of the community.
it would be crazy to allow someone to loose out on their dream of even applying because the mother of all storms decided to hit the east coast of America. surely its http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Act_of_God exception :)
Lets remember Winston
"A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty."
Only good things can come from opening it longer given what's happened.
Agreed. Look at the situations reversed : Earthquake on the west coast... How tasteless it would be for the New Yorkers to insist that YC keeps to its original deadline.
I am an applicant in SF and ready to submit. As I watch CNN coverage the whole episode, I see that it is really bad. NYSE floor is under 3 feet of water! A day postponement will give the applicant in east coast a breather but don't know how much of help it will be with all the power outage and other hassle with a day. Well, they are going to do the start up anyway. :)
The National Institutes of Health, which is serious about deadlines in grant applications, gives applicants extra days when they are affected by a natural disaster. One day per day their institution was closed. It seems like it would be sensible to pick an institution (like the New York Stock Exchange) and allow extra days via a similar policy.
I don't think pushing the deadline back by one day is a good idea. The people who are not affected by the storm don't need the extra day; the people who are affected by the storm will probably need considerably more than a day.
Given that YC already has a policy of considering late applications, I would opt for keeping the deadline where it is but loudly announcing "if you couldn't get your application in by the deadline because of the hurricane, please submit a late application". And possibly add a "I'm applying late because of the hurricane" checkbox to the form.
I think it's probably better to ask people if they were affected rather than trying to guess based on their location. It's not something you can get really get away with lying about, since it just takes an interviewer asking "so, tell me how you were affected by the hurricane" to get someone blacklisted.
> The people who are not affected by the storm don't need the extra day; the people who are affected by the storm will probably need considerably more than a day.
They might need another day, or days, if their power is currently out.
It may not be an epiphany, but watching just a few seconds of the news coverage I thought of the number of times many of those things had happened to NYC in summer disaster movies.
If I had cameras, boats/kayaks, a few actors & friends to help out, shoot overnight on the deserted river roads, a few lines of dialogue and a rough idea for a story, I'd be out there trying to shoot with big-budget backgrounds that would normally cost tens of millions in sound stages or post-production. Though since I'm currently in Toronto, can't really do it.
If I'd been able to plan (or had the idea a few days ago to be able to plan and know in advance how it would likely look), for perhaps $10-20k (mostly for rented boats, cameras and bail money) could have had a semi-decent looking disaster movie or a good short film. Getting the moment the lights went out from some high vantage points & down on the water would have been amazing too.
While it appears clever it is in fact inhumane. While people suffer and die during these days and every spare pair of hands is in need, you'll be making a movie out of it to entertain masses and make a buck.
False equivalence: clever (here: profitable) vs humane.
You can easily be one without being the other. Or both, or neither.
Moreover, people suffer and need every spare pair of hands these days just as they do every day. In NY, in NJ, everywhere. What's your excuse for "making a buck" and not helping, the rest of the year?
So you are implying that it is acceptable to have a camera crew filming people while they are dying? Well, that's being too literate, but anyway, if it was a documentary film - I would have no problem with that. The author however quite clearly compares it to "disaster movies" which are not. And making a profit out of an event that caused people's sufferings without helping them out is not what I consider to be good.
A special checkbox for late applications is a great idea. I would also suggest asking the teams affected by the storm to send an email to YC or post to a new thread (assuming they have some Internet access, I still see lots of tweets from NY!) This will give you an estimate of how many late applications to expect.
Ironically, the people who need this extension the most can't actually vote at the moment. So I would consider some multiplier to the number of Yes votes to account for them.
150 comments
[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 196 ms ] threadAn extra day isn't going to change anything. I'd say push it by a week or don't bother changing the date.
(EDIT: these are the main carrier hotels and colocation facilities in the Northeast, all in Manhattan.)
Also, woo, no more 111 8th. Building power is down for most of the building (all of it?) (per floor), although some of the areas have their own generators (Level(3) and the old AboveNet area)
Was just listening in on FDNY radio scanner and they mentioned oil/diesel floating down the street in water.
Big scale server colos are usually in WA/OR (cheap power), SFBA (fiber, tech companies), TX (cheap land, sort of cheap power, or at least available power), or DC metro (sort of cheap power, cheap land in some areas, lots of government users).
As a side note, Internap's LGA11 datecentre facility on 75 Broad Street is currently being evacuated, and most of the fuel reserves are submerged below water...
The report I heard (at about 11PM EDT) was that the basement was flooded and the building was being evacuated, but servers would keep running for 5-7 hours until the back-up generators ran out of fuel.
Hope y'all are safe out there.
We had to hack our way in a storm to submit our YC application.
* Note for application reviewers: Email is in my profile, thanks.
I would say yes.
I lost ten days of power/connectivity in Isaac.
I'm not in this YC run, but to be honest, I don't think a day's really enough.
that said, subways being closed is going to be a huge hassle for the next few days.
They evacuated NYU Langone Hospital when its backup generator failed, so yes, consider yourself very lucky.
I imagine that a lot of YC folks may be scrambling to check on homes and loved ones and trying to keep generators working, etc.
I think a deadline extension would be appropriate. I know there's an argument to be made that folks should be prepared, but this (like many of the weather events I got to experience in Western Mass last year) really is unprecedented.
(I have no stake in this, I just think extending the deadline is the right thing to do).
Edit: I stand corrected. I'm the kind of person who gets things done early and then reads/refactors it every day making minor edits.
Edit: Maybe you filter by location? But why make it complex?
Given that situation, a delay would be symbolic more than anything.
Still worth doing.
This is probably the first time in last 100 years for dwellers living in Manhattan downtown see flood in their homes. Especially for people who lives in ground floor or basements.
http://www.ny1.com/content/top_stories/171528/sandy-strikes-...
it would be crazy to allow someone to loose out on their dream of even applying because the mother of all storms decided to hit the east coast of America. surely its http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Act_of_God exception :)
Lets remember Winston
"A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty."
Only good things can come from opening it longer given what's happened.
NYSE not flooded...
http://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-OD-13-00...
[edit: Originally said "deus ex machina". My mistake, thanks Falling3]
Given that YC already has a policy of considering late applications, I would opt for keeping the deadline where it is but loudly announcing "if you couldn't get your application in by the deadline because of the hurricane, please submit a late application". And possibly add a "I'm applying late because of the hurricane" checkbox to the form.
They might need another day, or days, if their power is currently out.
If I had cameras, boats/kayaks, a few actors & friends to help out, shoot overnight on the deserted river roads, a few lines of dialogue and a rough idea for a story, I'd be out there trying to shoot with big-budget backgrounds that would normally cost tens of millions in sound stages or post-production. Though since I'm currently in Toronto, can't really do it.
If I'd been able to plan (or had the idea a few days ago to be able to plan and know in advance how it would likely look), for perhaps $10-20k (mostly for rented boats, cameras and bail money) could have had a semi-decent looking disaster movie or a good short film. Getting the moment the lights went out from some high vantage points & down on the water would have been amazing too.
You can easily be one without being the other. Or both, or neither.
Moreover, people suffer and need every spare pair of hands these days just as they do every day. In NY, in NJ, everywhere. What's your excuse for "making a buck" and not helping, the rest of the year?
Personally, I would find it in bad taste. Profitable? Perhaps... but likely not. At least not directly -- a PR stunt, at most.
So, a rather bad combo overall IMO: would piss people off & not make the buck.